from left: Patrick D. Kennedy, Pippa Pearthree, Sara Gettelfinger, Douglas Sills, Tom Corbeil, Cortney Wolfson, and Blake HammondZ

To craft The Addams Family musical haunting the Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theatre from February 7 to 19, its creators dove directly into Charles Addams’ original New Yorker cartoons. They surfaced with a most sardonic sense, says book writer Rick Elice, a Tony nominee for Jersey Boys. In particular, he was struck by a cartoon where young Wednesday Addams has clearly just been poisoned by her brother, Pugsley. In response, mother Morticia advises the glum girl: “You poison him right back.”

  Uncle Fester (Hammond) can conduct electricity.

“There were no consequences. You wonder what happens when he poisons his sister. Does she get sick, does she go to the hospital, does she die?” asks Elice. “You start to think about those questions and your brain implodes like a grapefruit.” So Elice and his creative team explore the Addams family dynamic in a touring version of the recently closed Broadway hit. The show spends a night with the Addamses as Wednesday brings home a perfectly smart and nice young man to meet the parents—to their utter horror, of course. “The story we’re telling is very relatable. We’ve all been through a situation where we’ve taken someone to meet our families,” says actor Blake Hammond, who plays Uncle Fester. “We’re all the same, we just have different likes and dislikes. [The Addams family] is not evil or out to hurt anyone. They just think spiders and snakes and cobwebs are fun.”

The creators have retooled the show for the tour, excising characters that Broadway audiences didn’t embrace. “Our vanity led us down the garden path, because we spent time with new characters, but the audience wanted to spend time with the characters they love,” Elice explains. “The situation is the same [as on Broadway], but it’s more about The Addams Family characters.”

The show is also a potential boon for the Citi Center, which six years ago partnered with a number of other nonprofit theater groups around the country to produce commercial shows. The Addams Family is their first major production. “The goal was that if you had the opportunity to have a significant ownership in a very successful Broadway show, that it could in fact be an annuity to that organization for a long time,” says Citi Center president and CEO Josiah Spaulding. “The Kennedy Center produced Annie, and all these years later it’s still reaping the benefits.” Which means The Addams Family is not only mysterious and spooky, it’s altogether lucrative. The Addams Family runs February 7–19. Tickets are $33–$103. Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theatre, 270 Tremont St., 866-348-9738; citicenter.org